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IETF 118 Hackathon

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is holding a hackathon to encourage developers and subject-matter experts to discuss, collaborate, and develop utilities, ideas, sample code, and solutions that show practical implementations of IETF standards.

This is the repository for the Resumable Uploads for HTTP (RUFH) hackathon project to hold the context and individual challenges. The project is beginner-friendly for those who are new to the IETF or new to the Hackathon.

Prerequisites

  • Familiarity with either JavaScript (runtimes), HTTP proxies, or building CLI tools.
  • Optionally, awareness of tus. RUFH is an evolution of tus, an existing open protocol for resumable uploads. As such you can look at practical implementations, such as the official tus-js-client and tusd, a reference implementation in Go with support for the new IETF protocol.

Resources

Challenges

Resumability polyfill for the Fetch API in browsers

In the current state of Resumable Uploads for HTTP, we would still need a small library to use it in the browser as the Fetch API does not support resumable uploads. Fetch falls under the WHATWG and there is an issue to discuss supporting resumable uploads but there is no timeline on that front.

Solution

To move things along and to have a plug-and-play alternative, we want to explore creating a polyfill for the Fetch API for resumable uploads. It could help to find a suitable API for resumable upload in browsers.

Requirements

  • A new resumable option (boolean, default: false). Open to alternative APIs.
const response = await fetch(url, {
  method: "POST",
  body: file,
  resumable: true,
});
  • When the request completes the response should be provided
  • Uploads should be pausable and resumable.
  • The current Fetch API does not expose informational responses (1XX) to the user. The polyfill should work around this by using Upload-Complete: ?0 to separate the upload creation from the data transfer in multiple requests.

Plugins for popular HTTP proxies for handling resumable uploads

In some cases people would like to handle files themselves through regular requests rather than having a separate (or integrable) RUFH server, which would write it to disk or to some storage provider. But they do want reliable, resumable uploads without reading the files again yourself.

In other cases a platform, such as WordPress, can not easily be extended to handle resumable uploads but could receive a traditional request with a file.

The Swift NIO implementation uses a similar approach.

Solution

Plugins for popular HTTP proxies, which handle resumability with buffering. Once the upload is complete, it will forward the upload as a regular HTTP request to your backend.

Nginx and HAProxy seem like a good place to start, but we‘re open to other contributions.

CLI program to test if a server conforms to the spec

Implementing RUFH (or tus) means re-implementing the same kind of end-to-end tests over and over again. To ensure compatibility and interoperability between servers and clients, a tool for checking conformity to the protocol is helpful.

Solution

A CLI program which runs end-to-end tests against a server.

Requirements

  • Lightweight. Little or no dependencies.
  • Single binary. People should not have to install a language and package manager to get the program, such as needing a package.json with Node.js
  • Flags to only run subsets of tests so you can incrementally build your server to test against
  • Optional: separate built-in tests for tus v1. tus already has a big ecosystem of clients and servers and users such as Cloudfare, Supabase, Vimeo, and many others. Every server implementation has to write their own end-to-end tests, which is sometimes done well but not always. The ecosystem would greatly benefit from a single source of truth for tests.

JavaScript runtime compatibility

There is a rise in JavaScript runtimes, such as Deno, Bun, Cloudfare Workers, AWS Lambda, and more. These should have minimal differences, but the devil is in the details and we need to know if the current version of RUFH works in most runtimes, particularly on the edge.

Solution

A minimal proof of concept of RUFH in JavaScript with different adapters for runtimes.